SNR issues for weeks, now upstream power levels bad. Internet unusable today.

[jontym]

I raised a formal complaint in July because my Hub was regularly cycling round and round as if it was just constantly rebooting.

Had an engineer round in September who confirmed there was no issue with the Hub, or any equipment in my apartment. He removed the 10dB Forward Path Attenuator and 6dB Wideband Attenuator that were previously connected between the incoming cable and the Hub. Told me there was an SNR issue on the network somewhere and asked for a network monitor for 3 days. Not heard anything since this visit.

The problem did not go away, and still hasn't. 

Today the connection has been totally unstable and unusable since at least 9am and ongoing currently. Am experiencing between 5% and 100% packet loss, and total loss of internet for a few seconds at a time, as well as wildly varying download speeds from the full 200mbps to 40-65mbps. Upload speed varying between the full 20mbps ish and zero.

Spent hours chatting to somebody on the Live Chat facility, to be told that my 'upstream power levels are bad' and that he could see my Hub regularly losing connection. Unfortunately he was unable to do anything at all apparently, and that I had to call somebody to explain this to them all over again right from the start. 

Suffice to say I didn't stay on hold waiting for longer than 15mins, don't really see why I should keep contacting you despite having 1) an open complaint that is over 3 months old and 2) you having confirmed there is an issue with your network. 

There is zero chance that I'm going to wait on hold for 1hr+ so thought I'd post here as a last resort. 

I wasn't going to bother referring my complaint to the ombudsman, but I probably will now given the debacle today which has seriously disrupted both my and my partner's ability to work from home. No doubt tomorrow will be the same given that nobody seems to be bothering to look into this.

EDITED to add that at least two of my neighbours in the same building confirmed to have the same issues at the same times that I do. 

[jontym]

Still haven't heard anything, and the problem still isn't fixed. I had to find another internet provider so I could do my job, obviously I'm still paying Virgin Media for a service I can't / am not using. They are adamant that no refunds or compensation will be made, because despite being utterly unusable, it "isn't a complete outage". 

[jontym]

Hi Mike, is anybody looking into this? 

[jontym]

I guess not.

Does anybody monitor these forums at all, any Virgin Media staff?

Somebody said they would look into this but so far.... not even a reply/DM. 

[MikeRobbo]

You can either phone in or wait on here, they are very busy and short staffed so everyone has to wait a lot longer than normal.

[jontym]

I've spent a combined 8+ hours on the phone to various VM departments. 

I'm not going to be calling in again, it achieves exactly nothing. I have grown rather tired of being told any or all of the following: 

- 'Your connection isn't totally down, it's just an intermittent fault' (it's so unstable, it's unusable, and thus I am not using it, but still paying for it)

- 'You have download x megabytes this month, so everything must be fine' (well no, devices are designed to retry repeatedly)

- 'You can't cancel, if you do we'll charge you an early cancellation fee due to contract terms and conditions blah blah' (apparently contract terms only apply when they are in Virgin Media's favour, the fact that they cannot provide the service is irrelevant) 

- 'We'll get a supervisor to call you back in x days' (nobody ever calls, these are just complete lies to close the call)

- 'It will be fixed in x days' (it hasn't been, these are also just complete lies to close the call)

Lost count of the number of times I've explained the situation, and been generally lied to.

I guess this is a Virgin Media sponsored forum so shouldn't be surprised that it's no better than any other avenue of communication. I'll give up on this too in a couple of days. 

[DontSubToVM]

I am experiencing the exact same issues (although my upstream qam is fine but the dbmv gets so high my router drops connection every 10mn)

And similarly they told me this:

---

@jontym wrote:

I've spent a combined 8+ hours on the phone to various VM departments. 

I'm not going to be calling in again, it achieves exactly nothing. I have grown rather tired of being told any or all of the following: 

- 'Your connection isn't totally down, it's just an intermittent fault' (it's so unstable, it's unusable, and thus I am not using it, but still paying for it)

- 'You have download x megabytes this month, so everything must be fine' (well no, devices are designed to retry repeatedly)

- 'You can't cancel, if you do we'll charge you an early cancellation fee due to contract terms and conditions blah blah' (apparently contract terms only apply when they are in Virgin Media's favour, the fact that they cannot provide the service is irrelevant) 

- 'We'll get a supervisor to call you back in x days' (nobody ever calls, these are just complete lies to close the call)

- 'It will be fixed in x days' (it hasn't been, these are also just complete lies to close the call)

Lost count of the number of times I've explained the situation, and been generally lied to.

I guess this is a Virgin Media sponsored forum so shouldn't be surprised that it's no better than any other avenue of communication. I'll give up on this too in a couple of days. 

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My thread in reference: https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Networking-and-WiFi/Broadband-not-working-due-to-faulty-cable-V...

[Jodi_S]

Hi DontSubToVM,

Thanks for posting on our community forums. Really disappointed that you're still experiencing issues, even after numerous technicians visit.

Due to this issue, I have located your account and would like to bring you in for a private chat. Please click on the purple envelope.

Kind regards Jodi.